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Wake County Sheriff Willie Rowe has spoken with the county’s police agencies about jail overcrowding but says he’s not asking them to change their operations or the number of people they are arresting.
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The sheriff told WRAL that he’s talked with police chiefs in the county about the situation and reportedly urged police officers to take discretion in arrests.
“We understand if a person is suspected or alleged to [have committed] a non-violent crime, one that does not warrant arrest, that they’ll continue to utilize their options, whether citation or how they handle it,” Rowe told WRAL. With a citation, people do not typically go to jail before their court date.
Rowe later clarified to The News & Observer that he is not asking any agency to change how it operates, nor is the sheriff’s office doing so itself.
“If officers determine that an arrest is appropriate and bring someone to the detention center, our responsibility is to be prepared to receive and safely house that individual,” he said in a statement.
The N&O has also asked both Raleigh and Cary police if they are changing any of their operations and has not received a response.
As of Wednesday, Wake County’s jails held just over 1,900 people, according to the sheriff’s office inmate catalog. However, sheriff’s office spokesperson Rosalia Fodera said the average number of inmates in July was 1,778.
That’s more than 200 inmates or approximately 13% over the jails’ capacity of 1,574.
Fodera said as of the last count, the sheriff’s office had sent five inmates to jails in other counties, including Caswell and Northampton counties. It costs $45 a day per inmate for Northampton County and $60 for Caswell.
Officials have blamed several different things for the capacity issues.
One that Rowe has mentioned is Iryna’s Law, named for Ukrainian immigrant Iryna Zarutska who was murdered on a Charlotte light rail train in 2025.
The law makes it more difficult for people charged with certain violent crimes to be released from jail on bail.
But county officials have previously cited Wake County’s growing population, staffing shortages in state prisons leading to Wake jails holding some state prisoners and delays in the justice system.
Wiley Nickel, the presumptive Wake County district attorney starting in 2027, has repeatedly asked state and local officials for money to hire more prosecutors. He said a lack of prosecutors in Wake County has slowed down the justice system, meaning people are spending more time in jail before their day in court.
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Mecklenburg County has 95 prosecutors, Nickel said, and Wake has just 45 despite having a higher population. Superior Court criminal cases in Wake County take 419 days to resolve.
Mecklenburg County is also facing significant capacity issues at its jails, however.
The state, which typically funds district attorney’s offices, didn’t put any additional prosecutors for Wake County in its budget.
“Let’s be clear about how we got here,” Nickel said in a news release Wednesday. “Senate Republicans added funding for 10 new Wake County prosecutors in the state budget. House GOP leaders pulled that funding at the last minute — playing politics with public safety and leaving Wake County with the worst-funded DA’s Office in the state. We’re operating with just over 64% of the staff the courts’ own workload formula says we need. Dead last in North Carolina.”
Nickel called on the Wake County Board of Commissioners — as he has done previously — to spend $2 million on additional prosecutors.
He previously told The N&O he hopes to have additional funding for the office by the end of 2026.
But Board of Commissioners Chair Don Mial has said it’s “just not financially possible right now” and funding prosecutors is the state’s responsibility, not the county’s.
He said the county is still losing money to the so-called “Blue Ridge” loophole, a state-created property tax break for affordable housing. Local leaders have used the name Blue Ridge because of a case in which a for-profit group, Blue Ridge Housing, owned 99.9% of an apartment complex, while a nonprofit partner owned just 0.1%. The complex got the tax break.
That’s estimated to cost the county $12 million this fiscal year, Mial said.
Wake County leaders previously set aside millions in their budget in order to expand jail capacity and address the issue.
The county is moving forward with a temporary fix: a more than $20 million plan to reopen an older jail building, called the detention center annex, across the street from the main jail.
As part of reopening the annex, the county plans to hire 92 new employees at county jails, totalling an additional $7 million. The annex is supposed to open sometime in the first quarter of 2027, and it will add 240 beds to the county’s inmate capacity.
Earlier this year, county officials decided to move forward with a plan to expand the county’s main jail on Hammond Road by 600 beds, which could take four years to complete. County officials say there’s no need for a bond or tax increase to fund construction, which could cost as much as $216 million.
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This story was originally published August 26, 2026 at 4:37 PM.